Twitter Tuesday - this week's Twitter news, apps and more

Welcome back to Twitter Tuesday, where we drop all the Twitter news and gossip from the past week, along with the latest Twitter apps and gizmos. This is my third week writing the column, and I've managed to stick to my promise not to make awful bird puns or affix the letters "tw" where they don't belong. Read on to see whether I can make it one more column without turning to the dark side.

Also: Twitter's conference sells out, Kevin Smith tweets about getting kicked off a plane, and your dog is now on Twitter.

Let's do this thing!

News from the home office this week: Twitter's first annual developer conference, Chirp, has sold out its first batch of tickets. There will be 800 tickets altogether for the San Francisco-based conference, but they're being released in three batches. To get one, you have to prove you're a developer by using the Twitter API to find a password, and then pay the steep $469 price tag. Who said Twitter didn't have a business model? If you miss out on the current round, don't freak out: there'll be another chance to buy tickets next month, and the conference itself isn't until April 14.


In Twitter app news, Windows Mobile users have a new Twitter client to try out: TouchTwit. It sports a nice-looking interface -- sorry, other WinMo clients, but you're kind of ugly -- along with photo uploading, a conversation view, built-in URL shortening, and the ability to delete a tweet. Looks like it's definitely worth a look.

If you want to display a Twitter widget on your website, using a custom search, Twiclur can help you out. This site lets you create a widget for the search of your choice, and then customize the widget's appearance. I think this could pretty useful if the search in question was your name, your company name, or your event's hashtag. Be careful, though, because there's no filtering. Even the example widget on Twiclur's site ("trending") is displaying some pretty course language. That's Twitter for you, though.

Legendary director Kevin Smith -- the guy behind Clerks, Mallrats, and Jay and Silent Bob -- tweeted about being kicked off a Southwest Airlines flight for being "too fat." Southwest caught Smith's tweets, and attempted to smooth over the situation with a bunch of tweets, a blog post and some personal phone calls. It apparently didn't work. Smith and Southwest are telling two different stories: SWA is saying Smith was too fat for the flight, and normally buys two seats when he flies. Smith is saying that he had two seats on this particular occasion, but it's because he's shy in person and wanted space, not because he's fat. Even though Smith passed SWA's "armrest test," they still removed him from the flight.

Is your dog ready for Twitter? I'm really sad that it's come to this, but there's now a tweeting dog collar with a USB receiver. Puppy Tweet, soon to be released by Mattel, detects your dog's movements and sounds, and posts one of 500 pre-written doggie tweets. Apparently, the messages don't really match your dog's movements, but they are kind of cute. Too bad they can't tell you when the pooch needs to go out for a pee break. [via Mashable]

If you want to find new folks on Twitter who already have plenty of friends in common with you, try Twiangulate. It shows where your social graph overlaps with two others', and displays the info as an interactive map. You can see categories like "biggest followers," "common followers" and "obscure friends." Apps like this have been around for Facebook for some time, but it's cool that Twitter finally has its own social graph visualizer. [via ReadWriteWeb]

That's it for Twitter Tuesday this week. Tune in next week for more useful, fun, or just plain weird news about everyone's favorite microblogging service.

Tags: chirp, SocialNetworking, touchtwit, tweets, twiangulate, twiclur, twitter, TwitterTuesday